Читать книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns - Страница 30

First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

Tune: Peggy Bawn

When chill November’s surly blast

Made fields and forests bare,

One ev’ning, as I wand’red forth

Along the banks of AIRE, Ayr

5 I spy’d a man, whose aged step

Seem’d weary, worn with care,

His face was furrow’d o’er with years,

And hoary was his hair.

Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?

10 Began the rev’rend Sage;

Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,

Or youthful Pleasure’s rage?

Or haply, prest with cares and woes,

Too soon thou hast began

15 To wander forth, with me to mourn

The miseries of Man.

The Sun that overhangs yon moors,

Out-spreading far and wide,

Where hundreds labour to support

20 A haughty lordling’s pride:

I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun

Twice forty times return;

And ev’ry time has added proofs,

That Man was made to mourn.

25 O Man! while in thy early years,

How prodigal of time!

Mis-spending all thy precious hours,

Thy glorious, youthful prime!

Alternate Follies take the sway,

30 Licentious Passions burn;

Which tenfold force gives Nature’s law,

That Man was made to mourn.

Look not alone on youthful Prime,

Or Manhood’s active might;

35 Man then is useful to his kind,

Supported is his right:

But see him on the edge of life,

With Cares and Sorrows worn;

Then Age and Want, Oh! ill-match’d pair!

40 Shew Man was made to mourn!

A few seem favourites of Fate,

In Pleasure’s lap carest;

Yet think not all the Rich and Great

Are likewise truly blest:

45 But Oh! what crouds in ev’ry land,

All wretched and forlorn,

Thro’ weary life this lesson learn,

That Man was made to mourn.

Many and sharp the num’rous Ills

50 Inwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves

Regret, Remorse, and Shame!

And Man, whose heav’n-erected face,

The smiles of love adorn,

55 Man’s inhumanity to Man

Makes countless thousands mourn!

See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,

Who begs a brother of the earth

60 To give him leave to toil;

And see his lordly fellow-worm

The poor petition spurn,

Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn.

65 If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,

By Nature’s law design’d,

Why was an independent wish

E’er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to

70 His cruelty, or scorn?

Or why has Man the will and pow’r

To make his fellow mourn?

Yet let not this too much, my Son,

Disturb thy youthful breast:

75 This partial view of human-kind

Is surely not the last!

The poor, oppressed, honest man

Had never, sure, been born,

Had there not been some recompence

80 To comfort those that mourn!

O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,

The kindest and the best!

Welcome the hour my aged limbs

Are laid with thee at rest!

85 The great, the wealthy fear thy blow,

From pomp and pleasure torn;

But, Oh! a blest relief to those

That weary-laden mourn!

This was written sometime during the summer of 1785. It is entered in the FCB under August 1785. In his commentary on l. 5 of this poem Kinsley remarks that a ‘meeting with a didactic sage is common in eighteenth-century poetry down to the time of Wordsworth. Burns’s immediate model was apparently the white-haired “grateful form” encountered “on distant heaths beneath autumn skies” by Shenstone (Elegies, vii)’. It is characteristic of Kinsley that as a commentator on Burns’s poems his eye is always fixed on the rear-view mirror hardly ever the road ahead. His commentary is eruditely, densely allusive to Burns’s sources; he rarely has anything to say about Burns’s seminal capacity to influence others, especially if the influence is of a political nature. Burns profoundly influenced Wordsworth. This poem, with its mixture of the elemental and political pains of existence, is probably the single best example of that influence. The depth of Burns’s political passion in the poem can be gauged from Gilbert’s account of its genesis when he noted that several of his brother’s poems were written to ‘bring forward some favourite sentiment of the author. He used to remark to me, that he could not well conceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a man seeking work. In casting about in his mind how the sentiment might be brought forward, the elegy Man was Made to Mourn was composed’ (Currie, iii. 384). Ll. 57–64 are this sentiment turned into poetry.

Mary Jacobus is particularly astute in her awareness of the degree to which Wordsworth creativity derived from the Scottish poet’s sense of the terrible injustices of the rampant agrarian revolution. As she remarks:

The Last of the Flock confronts, not death, but destitution – the plight of the labouring poor. Burns’s Man was Made to Mourn: A Dirge was clearly in Wordsworth’s mind during the spring of 1798, and its lament for the human condition shapes his poem (Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 (Oxford: 1976), p. 202).

Wordsworth’s Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman is, if anything, even closer to Burns’s dirge. Simon Lee, a tragic version of Tam Sampson, is faced with not only the increasingly severe symptoms of geriatric decline but the brutal redundancy of, no longer useful, being cast into helpless destitution. This combination of age and political injustice exactly follows Burns and his poem is deliberately echoed in the last lines of Wordsworth’s:

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning;

Alas! The gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.

The Dirge is also echoed in Wordsworth’s Lines Written in Early Spring: ‘Have I not reason to lament/ What man has made of man?’, (ll. 23–4). The Leech Gatherer in Resolution and Independence, a poem in which Burns (ll. 45–9) makes an unnamed appearance, is also partly derived from the Dirge. Wordsworth’s poem perhaps postulates a more spiritual consolation than Burns’s Dirge with its vision of that ultimate and absolute democratic equaliser, Death itself.